A cool new feature went Generally Available in the Azure Portal this week where you can save a bit of time and create your new VM in Azure and enable it for Azure Site Recovery at the same time.

This will save having to enable ASR as a separate task once you have created your VM.

More information here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/updates/enable-asr-create-vm/

From the portal you create your VM as follows:

Create a Virtual Machine

Complete the Basics Tab:

Add any Disks required:

Configure your Networking Options:

Under the Management Tab you will notice a new ‘Site Recovery’ Option, check this:

You will notice that you can now configure your secondary region for ASR together with selecting your recovery services vault (or create a new one) as well as assigning or creating your Site recovery policy:

Once your VM has been crated, if you check the Disaster Recovery Tab under ‘Operations’ you will see that ASR will be enabled and Replication to your secondary region will commence:

The Site Recovery Job status can then be checked:

Once your replication has completed you can then go ahead and create any site recovery plans you require!

I hope this is of use to you and I am sure you will agree that this is a great feature addition into the Azure Portal, making it simpler to implement any Disaster Recovery for your VM’s, but don’t forget to enable VM Backup at the same time!